Dan Savage

Dan Savage, byname of Daniel Keenan Savage, (born October 7, 1964, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American writer who rose to prominence in the 1990s via his frank and ribald syndicated sex-advice newspaper column “Savage Love.” He gained additional fame after writing numerous books and for creating (in 2010) the It Gets Better Project, an Internet-based effort to support and inspire lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youths.

Savage grew up in Chicago and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was living in Madison, Wisconsin, when an acquaintance mentioned that he was moving to Seattle to launch a new alternative newspaper, The Stranger. Savage made an offhand comment that every newspaper should have an advice column, and he was hired to write one despite having no experience.

“Savage Love” debuted in 1991 and was initially a tongue-in-cheek work, as the openly gay Savage lampooned the conventions of the staid advice columns that catered to a heterosexual audience. However, over time, he embraced his role as a giver of advice, and—while the columns retained a humorous streak—he started offering substantive advice to all manner of reader questions, particularly those concerning either (or both) homosexuality and the more idiosyncratic practices of human sexual behaviour. His blunt advice proved extremely popular with readers, and “Savage Love” was nationally syndicated by the late 1990s. The column also spun off into a short-lived call-in show and a podcast, Savage Lovecast, which was launched in 2006. In addition to writing his weekly column, Savage became editor in chief of The Stranger in 2001 and editorial director of the paper in 2007.

The success of “Savage Love” turned Savage into a media gadfly, and he became a frequent talk-show guest, contributed to the public radio program This American Life, and had a college-centred sex-advice show on MTV called Savage U (2012). He also gained notoriety for a series of politically themed exploits that he undertook to protest right-wing politicians’ stances on homosexuality. Prominent among those was his effort in 2003 to create a new word, santorum, after former U.S. senator Rick Santorum compared homosexual sex to child rape and bestiality. Savage created a Web site with his explicit definition of santorum, and it became one of the top results of a search for Santorum’s name on Google. That “Google bomb” persisted for years, drawing Santorum’s anger during his failed attempt to become the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.

In 2010, in response to a rash of suicides by gay teenagers, Savage and his husband made a YouTube video to tell frustrated or distraught LGBT youths that life will get better as they grow older. The video kicked off the It Gets Better Project, which compiled thousands of similar user-created support messages, including videos by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Lady Gaga, Stephen Colbert, and Ellen DeGeneres.

Savage also wrote a number of best-selling nonfictional books, such as Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America (2002), The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family (2005), and American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics (2013).